The Communists were at the farmer’s market this weekend.
I mean the actual Communists, not the people often labeled as such these days.
They were holding up newspapers—print ones!—with a ginormous headline about a coming oil catastrophe, and calling, “Are you sick of capitalism?”
My first thought was, “Are you for real?” My second was the desire to say, “Well, yes, in fact, I am sick of capitalism, but I don’t think communism is the solution.”
Only slightly less amusing was the juxtaposition of the beef-and-pork vendor beside the vegan vendor.
I guess this isn’t exactly pop culture. Then again, maybe it kind of IS. The deeper we as a culture sink into our online bubbles, the more caricatured, the less nuanced, our perception of reality becomes.
Regardless, I wanted to start there because I wanted to underscore that when I say that people like to go looking for things to be mad about, I’m not suggesting that it only infects one side of the cultural divide.
That being said…
People need to quit looking for things to be mad about.
For me it began when the USCCB labeled the live-action Beauty and the Beast as “morally offensive,” after conservative media lost their minds over men dressed as women. I was like, “Ummmm… did any of you watch the original? Overreacting much?” Incidentally, I have never looked at USCCB movie ratings since then.
A Christian podcast that calls itself politically middle-of-the-road went after Moana a few years ago. Why do they keep making stories about people who have to go somewhere ELSE to find happiness? they moaned.
While I think it’s great to seek purpose and meaning right where you are, picking that nit with Moana is just ludicrous. Moana’s island is dying because the goddess had been robbed of the heart that helped her remember her identity. Without it, she’s ravaging the world. Moana’s people thought they would preserve themselves from the death that surrounded them by cutting themselves off from the larger world. Moana’s vocation is to reconnect all that was severed.
But by all means, belittle her for leaving her island. Better to be content where you are and oh well, the whole world dies, too bad so sad? #christianvalues #not
Also: journeying stories have been part of human history since the beginning. Does the Odyssey ring a bell? The Lord of the Rings? Forget secular culture. What about the call of Abraham? The call of Moses? The Exodus, the 40 years in the desert, the flight into Egypt, “go and preach the Gospel to all nations”?
The idea that there’s something to mock in a story of a girl who leaves home to save her people is ludicrous. It doesn’t belong in a Christian mindset.
When the new Snow White movie came out, my Facebook feed turned into a toxic sludge pit of hate on it. “Woke Snow White Doesn’t Even Have Dwarves,” one memorable headline proclaimed. I went, What? Doesn’t the preview literally start with the dwarves singing Heigh Ho? How can anyone fall for this nonsense?
But when I saw the movie, I realized what the purveyors of that post found so threatening. The movie started off with a narrative about how the good king and queen believed that the bounty of the land belonged to everyone. Uh-oh! Communism!
Or not. How about “Catholic teaching”? Ever heard of the universal destination of goods?
I will fully acknowledge that Snow White was not the strongest of the new Disney remakes (I’ve seen them all and probably will continue to do so). It was a little over-earnest.
But it was a heck of a lot of fun. (How can you not like “Princess Problems”?) Plus, they did a much, much better thing for Dopey than the original. I’m not sure I can even watch the original anymore, having raised a child with Down syndrome to adulthood.
And here’s the thing. Over the years, conservatives have griped about how we can’t just have good guys and bad guys anymore; the villains all have to have these complex psychological stories to explain why they became villains.
Well, in Snow White, Disney said, great! You want a 2D villain? Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo! And then people complained about that, too.
In recent months, Trump has gone after late night TV. I don’t know why it hadn’t connected with me, but all three of those guys—Kimmel, Colbert, and Fallon—are Catholic, and pretty vocal about it. Trump acts like they single him out, but I remember plenty of zingers about Obama and Clinton in clips I’ve seen over the years.
What’s notable now, though, is that they’re more overtly connecting their opposition to Trump with the faith that spurs that opposition. I don’t know that I have a big “point” to this one, just an observation that seems worth putting into the pot to simmer for a while.
When that nonsense about coins with Trump’s picture on them came out, someone I know said they should go ahead and do it because (this wasn’t the only point, but it was one of the major ones) it would piss off Rosie O’Donnell. I went, What? Did I miss something? Has Rosie O’Donnell said something lately?
I went to search news articles, and the only thing I saw was ten months old. I looked at Instagram, too. Four weeks ago she shared somebody else’s writeup that was political and aimed at Trump, but that was one of about fifty posts she’s shared, the other 49 of which are personal or about Broadway. Why on earth, of everyone you could complain about, would you pick Rosie O’Donnell?
My point is that these kinds of clickbait complaints are inflammatory without illuminating anything. They come across as people looking for something to hate on, just to make a splash and get attention. That may not be what’s in their hearts, but that’s what it looks like from the outside.
And when holes are so easy to poke in your complaints, you risk looking ridiculous. We don’t need Christians looking ridiculous. Not about pop culture. It represents God poorly.
Wouldn’t it be better to look ridiculous for something with substance? To stand up for the migrant looking for a life of dignity, for instance? Or the dignity of human beings sentenced to death, given that death sentences are heavily skewed toward minorities? Or for living wages and equal access to health care and education?
In full disclosure, I have a soft spot for the entertainment industry, because I’m a storyteller. I want to make a living writing stories that people will want to read. I’m inclined to give grace to the entertainment industry, because I know how hard writing a story is, and how brutal the process of publishing (making a movie, etc.) is. This, too, is a vocation, undertaken because you have a call—a call and a gift that come from the Holy Spirit.
Of course, the gift can be misused. But I’d like us to pause and ponder, to examine a little more instead of knee-jerk reacting to pop culture in pursuit of a dopamine hit.
On that note—pausing, taking time—I’m going to spend a few weeks working my way through Magnifica Humanitas. I know, I’m behind, and the news cycle has moved on. But really, I don’t see how anyone could have actually processed that encyclical before the news cycle DID move on. Care to read it, slowly, over the next weeks, and have a chat about it here? Pretty please?
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